Pocket watch and flowers on a shoulder blade

The watch came back to the bench on Wednesday, wrapped in the same blue tissue paper your mother keeps for the good cups. Mr Abernethy says the mainspring is shot and the crystal will need replacing, but the case is sound, and inside the lid is an inscription in a hand I would know anywhere, which is to say my own, from the fourth of July, 1928, the hot afternoon I engraved it for Walter. I told you about that, didn't I? The day the tram overheated on Briggate and we all stood about fanning ourselves with flower-fair programmes.

Walter wanted the numerals Roman because his father had them, and he wanted the hands set at a quarter past nine. I said a watch stopped is only a clock waiting to be forgiven, and he laughed and said that was the most Yorkshire thing he had ever heard. I have been turning that line over all week.

Now the part you need to know. The woman who brought it in did not give her name. She had violets pinned to her coat and she asked me to wind it once, then leave it running on the bench overnight. On Thursday morning it was ticking away and the hands had crept past the quarter hour, as if someone had been sitting with it in the dark.

I have not told Mr Abernethy. I only wind it each morning now, the way she asked, and set the blue tissue beside it. I am beginning to think I ought to be writing to her rather than to you.

Your loving brother, Tom